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A review by gh7
Poems and Prose by Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Gardner
3.0
Hopkins' poems, especially when read aloud, are often astounding feats of musicality. Like the written equivalent of beads of light flickering to nature's pulse on the gossamer strands of a spiderweb. Apparently he pioneered a technique known as sprung rhythm and in his best poems every word does exactly that - springs rhythm, creating a kind of hypnotic ring of enchantment around his subject. Mostly he writes about nature and God. His nature poems had my full attention; his God poems rather less so.
Hopkins' prose bored me silly. Firstly, we get extracts from a journal and almost immediately I got a sense of a man hiding from himself. He appears to have no inner life. Or as if it's something he's concreted over. There's a lot of sensibility responding to nature but it's kind of hollow when there's so little personality attached to the voice. The letters that follow are even more bereft of inspiration or life. He comes across as a varnished surface. Talks complacently about Empire as if it's a rose garden that has to be maintained with diligence. The most emotional he ever gets is when he becomes mildly indignant at a kindly vicar who unprompted, sends one of Hopkins' poems to a local newspaper.
Hopkins became a Catholic priest and destroyed all his early poems. The Catholic church, in his imagination at least, then functioned as a kind of censor on what he wrote. At the end of the day, you're either a poet or poetry is a hobby of yours. Hopkins seems caught up in this dilemma and perhaps it eventually caused him to be less of a poet than he should have been. A natural gift he has in abundance. One wishes he forged for himself a much more interesting and courageous life. Instead he chose to pinch and squeeze himself into the embodiment of Victorian starch, formality and repression. Shelley or Byron he is not.
Hopkins' prose bored me silly. Firstly, we get extracts from a journal and almost immediately I got a sense of a man hiding from himself. He appears to have no inner life. Or as if it's something he's concreted over. There's a lot of sensibility responding to nature but it's kind of hollow when there's so little personality attached to the voice. The letters that follow are even more bereft of inspiration or life. He comes across as a varnished surface. Talks complacently about Empire as if it's a rose garden that has to be maintained with diligence. The most emotional he ever gets is when he becomes mildly indignant at a kindly vicar who unprompted, sends one of Hopkins' poems to a local newspaper.
Hopkins became a Catholic priest and destroyed all his early poems. The Catholic church, in his imagination at least, then functioned as a kind of censor on what he wrote. At the end of the day, you're either a poet or poetry is a hobby of yours. Hopkins seems caught up in this dilemma and perhaps it eventually caused him to be less of a poet than he should have been. A natural gift he has in abundance. One wishes he forged for himself a much more interesting and courageous life. Instead he chose to pinch and squeeze himself into the embodiment of Victorian starch, formality and repression. Shelley or Byron he is not.